Most regulators grant contingent convertible bonds the status of equity. The theory, however, suggests that these securities can distort banks’ incentives to issue new equity. Using a model and European data, this column shows that banks with lower risk are more likely to issue CoCos compared to their riskier counterparts. In line with Basel III, banks are expected to raise equity prior to CoCo conversion, which makes the bonds an expensive source of capital. The design of CoCos should be revised if they are to enjoy equity-like treatment.

In emerging economies, studies of the relationship between foreign investor participation in public equity markets and aggregate economic activity find strong effects on productivity, investment, economic growth, and the price of publicly traded stocks. But it is not clear why. The column shows that equity capital inflows increase the supply of funding available to firms in emerging market economies, encouraging firms to obtain more equity financing to invest and expand. Large firms benefit most from those inflows.

The slope of the yield curve is of interest to policymakers and market participants alike. But despite being a good in-sample predictor of the equity risk premium, it performs rather poorly out-of-sample. This column finds that the low-frequency component of the term spread is a strong and robust out-of-sample equity risk premium predictor for several forecasting horizons. This finding adds to recent empirical evidence that the level and price of aggregate risk in equity markets are strongly linked to low-frequency economic fluctuations.

Nearly a year on from the Global Crisis, many argue that the international banking system remains broken. Anat Admati discusses how the structure of banks makes them fragile, and why they should be regulated in order to withstand shocks.

In the wake of the Global Crisis, emerging Europe has experienced a sharp drop in investment levels. As a result, income convergence has virtually come to a halt. This column presents key findings of the EBRD’s latest Transition Report, urging countries in emerging Europe to rebalance their financial systems in order to reignite economic growth. Rebalancing is necessary in terms of the available debt–equity mix, the currency composition of credit, banks’ funding sources, and cross-border investment partners.

There is reasonable hope that the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris (COP21) will reach a consistent global climate agreement. What makes the negotiations particularly difficult is not economic efficiency, but the equity implications of climate policy. This column presents a framework for incorporating equity concerns into policy design. Building from four equity principles, it reduces the complex problem of international burden sharing to a simple rule tied to a single metric.

There has been a long-term downward trend in labour’s share of national income, depressing both demand and inflation, and thus prompting ever more expansionary monetary policies. This column argues that, while understandable in a short-term business cycle context, this has exacerbated longer-term trends, increasing inequality and financial distortions. Perhaps the most fundamental problem has been over-reliance on debt finance. The authors propose policies to raise the share of equity finance in housing markets; such reforms could be extended to other sectors of the economy.

Economic policymakers across Europe have sought to increase labour market flexibility by promoting the use of temporary employment. This column points to a possible trade-off between efficiency and equity when deregulating labour markets, suggesting that flexible forms of employment can be both a boon and a bane for labour markets and for society as a whole.

Many interpret countries' scores in international testing as grades of their national educational policies. Summarising evidence from international maths exams, this column finds that the highest-scoring countries are those with the least inequality in test scores, suggesting a “virtuous” equity-efficiency trade-off. It also finds that countries perform even better when test scores are highly correlated with the number of books in the family home.

The carbon-pricing implications of cap-and-trade programmes have raised concern that they might be a regressive policy tool. This column documents how allowance allocation schemes similar to those in recently proposed US legislation address distributional concerns and challenges the view that carbon pricing is necessarily regressive.

Past performance is no guarantee, but history tells us that the equity risk premium has been persistent. This column shows that British investors enjoyed relatively high returns in the nineteenth century, though today’s UK market differs greatly from its formative ancestor.